Eulogy

Note: My grandmother passed away around the middle of the day today. I had orginally wanted to find a quote to post on my Facebook page, but couldn't find something that fit. Posted here because it's a bit more personal & accessible than my dA account. Haven't edited yet, but I want to post it before I go to bed - will clean it up a bit & add the text/note after I get some sleep. Tbh I'd rather talk politics or the weather than hear any condolences -- this is intended as a tribute, please please please do not read it as anything but a tribute -- but I'm posting it for the public to comment on, so I'm resigned to people expressing their support regardless (please please please, ask me about recent legislature or something instead).

--

When my father told me that my grandmother was dead, I did not cry. We are not criers, my family: but my father had been perilously close often over the last few weeks. I nodded, asked a few quiet questions about funeral procedures, and turned back to my laptop.

(This was on Saturday. Her deadline had been shortened on Tuesday, from two to six months to two to five days.)

Intermittently, during the empty spaces that dotted the week before her death, I had listened to the saddest music I knew, trying to find the right quote for the way I loved her, the way I would miss her. I kept wondering, Am I going to cry now? On Tuesday night, I felt a hollowness at the back of my throat and a warmth behind my eyes, but no tears came to crystallize the kitchen lamp and banish the weight in my gut. I am a writer: loss comes not in emotive expression but in the empty spaces that no words can express.


--

A week before Saturday, my grandmother read my writing for the first time in years -- perhaps the first time ever. I emailed my father a number of my stories so he could show her while he was in Kentucky. My father called and told me that he thought she'd read one, my final assignment for my fiction class the year before; he said he could hear her laugh while she read it. Later she texted me: [Text.]

She was always proud of her grandchildren, by virtue of their existence as her grandchildren. I have never seen a smile so generous or so genuine at good news from family, and even at twenty-one I have met many generous and genuine people.

That was the last thing I heard from her.

--

Three weeks before, my father brought and with my two siblings me to visit her in Kentucky. We left home at four in the afternoon and so arrived in the early hours of the morning, but my grandmother was awake. She was too thin. I leaned over her bed near the living room window and hugged her, careful not to touch her left leg, trying not to be alarmed or upset. My father asked about the shades across one window -- didn't she want to see her birds at the feeder? -- and my grandmother answered that the morning sun woke her too early.

For the first time since my mid-teens, I was kept awake that night by an urge to capture a particular image into words. I wrote a poem about the songbirds' cousin, caged by tubes, and knew it was cliche, and knew that it wasn't true to her spirit, and knew that nothing else could capture the visceral fragility of her bones in my arms.

--

The in-home care my father had hired was doing an excellent job. The hospice medical care was not. My father is a manager. When I was younger I cringed in embarrassment at his stubborn insistence on excellent service (What is this? Put me on the phone with your boss) but now I felt fiercely proud, because this was my grandmother and he was making absolute certain that she would get the best care.

(The next weekend, at my siblings' graduation, my aunt would mention that he called her and yelled. He replied that he was ranting, not yelling. I informed them that this sounded eerily like a conversation I might have with my own brother.)

My father made sure to get the life story of each and every person who came to care for my grandmother, "because they should be like family," he said, and because he wanted to be sure they would give good care. My interactions were more sporadic: the travel and experiences and dreams of one (her year in Alaska, my semester in England; my degree as a creative writer, her desire to go into diesel engineering); another's new puppies; the Spongebob scrubs and bibliophilia of a third. They cleaned and cooked excellent food. The last person to stay with my grandmother had left her sun room a mess: grass seed and birdseed spilled, mouse droppings all over. My sister and I cleaned.

At first, my grandmother slept a lot. It was hard for me to tell whether she wanted company or silence, and I was cagey, uncertain which words were safe and which perilous. The last afternoon, while my father was discussing improved care with hospice, I sat in a chair in the living room for lunch. The nurse, my grandmother's favorite, promptly ordered me onto the seat beside the bed. "Sit up here and talk to your Grandma," she told me.

So here was the thing I had secretly been dreading; but I was at once intimidated and comforted by the nurse's brisk cheerfulness, and so I hesitantly took the seat. The nurse had made stew and cornbread, and this was a few minutes' occupation. I said the food was very good -- I said this often, as I always did when we came south -- and then, because my grandmother was looking at me with her honest, delighted smile, I said everything that came to mind. I told her about college and my friends back home. I passed a message from one friend, whom she ordered to visit.

(Two weeks before that Saturday in July, because my friend was up for a road trip, we made plans to visit at the beginning of August.)

The anxiety slipped away from me as we spoke, because she was still the same woman, with her straightforward answers to complicated questions and affectionate stories about people I'd never met. A hardness began to settle in my gut, because of the reality of her and because I'd already gotten used to her thinness.

I decided I would visit at least once more before the summer was out, since I would probably be in England when she passed, and left a note for the nurses to add me on Facebook. So you can show her pictures of England, I wrote, the same way she said Six months when asked how long it would take her leg to heal.

--

I had taken to carrying the afghan my grandmother had made for me around everywhere I went. My Grandma made it for my thirteenth birthday. It is yellow with peach, lavender, and pastel green stripes. She wrote on a note when she gave it to me: Note. I kept the note in a jewelry box when I was younger, in a folder with other memorabilia when I grew old enough to accumulate such things.


It was something of an in-joke in the family that I took the afghan wherever I traveled -- and I did, as if this possession made with love could carry family wherever I went and perhaps absorb a bit of the places I visited. Usually, when I was home, it sat on my bed at one of two houses. It was loosely crocheted and a bit too small to be comfortable to curl up in. But now it went with me from house to house, from room to room. It was born of a superstitious urge, not to preserve her life, but to remind some invisible watcher that I was thinking of her and cared.

--

My grandmother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in October of 2011. I think I knew when I first heard -- that this was the beginning of a slow downslide, that there would be no recovery or that recovery would be a few years' brief gift -- but I chose not to think about it. No point in worrying about a future I could not predict or control.

My great-uncle had passed away that February. 2011 was a difficult year for me, but I was troubled more by the future I was falling into than the spectre of a generation passing.

--

The summer of 2010, at my request, my father took us to visit family across the south. By blood I have two aunts, one uncle, and three first cousins, but my father has more cousins than I can count. I wanted to see this elusive extended family before I left my immediate family for college.

My father spent part of his childhood in Michigan, and my grandmother lived in small but relatively developed Somerset, but my family is rooted in Leslie County, Appalachia. It's a rough country. Its people take pride in common sense, independence, and family loyalty. They say all European-Americans are immigrants, and I suppose it's true, but somewhere along the six generations buried in a tiny cemetery in Leslie County, enough Appalachia got into our blood for me to recognize home when I encountered it: the soft green mountains against the blue sky, the dropped 'g's and euphemisms my father still falls into when talking to family, the plain, straightforward speak, and the honest delight to see a long-lost splinter of the far-flung family.

We spent a few days at my Grandma's, a few at my aunt's in Tennessee, a few at my uncle's in North Carolina. On the day we went to Leslie County, we stopped for lunch at a town perched between two hills. The main street was only a handful of buildings long, empty enough that I thought it was just a waystation between more populous areas until my father and grandmother indicated otherwise; I remember being deeply confused by the lack of citizens or houses, but looking back I assume the houses were set further back -- hollows between the hills.

(Later, after lunch, my father would carefully navigate the hillside hairpins to our cousins' house and explain how his own father would make him sick, he went around the curves so fast. He would explain about hollows and kudzu. I assumed kudzu was a strange Southern word like the hollow-holler, an oddly spelled idiom with a straightforward etymology. It was such an established part of the landscape that I was surprised to find it was, in fact, an invasive weed from Japan.)

While we were eating lunch, my grandmother pointed up the hill and told us that the best friend of her childhood used to live up there. Storytelling, like Southern accents and good food and long car rides, was a staple of family visits: A mere hour's visit is an insult to the host, and stories fill up the time and catch up on years of news in a diverting way. I was used to stories about my grandmother's youth, about the grandfather I never knew, about the Cherokee princess said to have married my great-great-grandfather, who turned her back on her people and was never again permitted to speak her own name. These stories wove themselves into the fabric of my personal history, of half-imagined places and times I could never experience.

Adults of my father's generation often grew impatient with my grandmother, because she was hard of hearing and didn't answer questions in ways they found useful. I was annoyed by their impatience, by their suggestions that perhaps she was a bit slow sometimes; clearly they did not understand her properly. She was my Grandma, and she had a beautiful wisdom born of common sense and years' experience. I loved her stories, the earnest and intent way she spoke to me of her youth and advised me to do what I loved, to take care of my body, to keep money in savings and a second name on my bank account.

I don't think I could see the house on the hill: maybe I was at the wrong angle to see out the restaurant window, or maybe she wasn't talking about a real house but its echo, the memory of a building that had long since been torn down. I don't remember. I remember realizing that I hadn't known my Grandma grew up in this very town. I tried to picture the school she attended with that best friend I didn't know, but all I could see was the Subway, commercially and stiflingly identical to every other Subway I had ever been to.

(When I asked about the funeral procedures, my father mentioned in passing that a man would give a eulogy. It seems strange to me that this man probably has more true stories to tell about my grandmother's life than I do.)

--

I do not cry for the same reason I do not write autobiographically: because the dark currents in me elude control, defy expression, slide sideways in a mercurial dance rather than risk being understood. I am a writer, and I am reticent by nature, and I am a proud and stubborn daughter of Appalachia. Sobs do not lurk in my chest waiting to be released; tears can be ripped out of me, but they come not from grief, but from frustration that I am expected to offer a response I do not own. I cannot express my most intimate feelings in a foreign medium.

But grief demands an outlet, my grandmother's memory a tithe, and here I offer what I have.

Happy 4th & updates

To any and all Americans: Happy Fireworks Day!

I am still alive, as it happens, and the novel is still kicking. I am about 10k into a second draft with an actual, real, honest (maybe not alive but still an) outline. It is helping muchly.

I have a great big long to-do list of things that must be completed before travels at the end of summer, but I do have a certain amount of free time on my hands. (Always assuming I don't waste hours researching bizarre and impossible details like how Ancient Roman ships docked...) I think I might try to do a weekly blog post type deal? And maybe see what I can do about the fact that this isn't a blog of interest for anyone anyway. People reading might make it worth writing, yanno.

Also: Hid all the posts from when this was a daily log back in October '11-December '12. I don't really like having all the random snippets up for the public eye, and anyway, they're not interesting enough to be worth the clutter.